When a corporate lawyer is murdered in Turkey, a string of events occur, from the arrest of a Russian freighter to the disappearance of a London financier. The logical connection must be one of love, deceit or the triumph of humanity.
When the young and beautiful wife of a much older embassy worker and amateur gardener is found murdered near Northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, his personal pursuit of the killers not only sets him up as their next target, but as a suspect among his embassy colleagues.
Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul. But it was Barley who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair, was befriended by a high-ranking Soviet scientist who could be the greatest asset to the West since perestroika began, and made a promise.
Andrew Osnard is an old Etonian and spy. His secret mission in Panama is two-pronged: to keep an eye on the political manoeuvrings leading up to the American handover of the Panama Canal on 31st December 1999, and to secure for himself the immense private fortune that has thus far eluded him.
After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the man's death, he begins his own investigation, meeting with Fennan's widow to find out what could have led him to such desperation. But on the very day that Smiley is ordered off the enquiry he receives an urgent letter from the dead man. Do the East Germans - and their agents - know more about this man's death than the Circus previously imagined?
Le Carré's debut novel, Call for the Dead, introduced the tenacious and retiring George Smiley in a gripping tale of espionage and deceit.
In an historic year for John le Carre, Hodder & Stoughton are proud to announce the publication of THE MISSION SONG.
Tim Cranmer, retired scret servant and Larry Pettifer, bored radical don, philanderer and for 20 years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanished Communist threat, have an unresolved rivalry that dates back decades. They follow each other to Moscow and then Southern Russia.
The Berlin Wall is toppled, the Iron Curtain swept aside. The Secret Pilgrim is Ned, a decent, loyal soldier of the Cold War, who has been in British Intelligence all his adult life. Now, approaching the end of his career, he is forced by the explosions of change to revisit his secret years.
Magnus Pym, ranking diplomat, has vanished, believed defected. The chase is on: for a missing husband, a devoted father, and a secret agent. Pym's life, it is revealed, is entirely made up of secrets. From the age of 17, he has been controlled by two mentors.
Ted Mundy, British soldier's son born 1947 in the new Republic of Pakistan and Sasha, son of an East German Lutheran pastor, first meet as students in West Berlin in the late 60s, then again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage and, most terribly, in the modern world of terror.
John le Carre reads his new novel. The fiction event of the autumn from 'the essential voice of our time' - Daily Telegraph
In these three masterly novels, John le Carré brings to thrilling life the shadowy battlegrounds of the Cold War - a war of ambiguous victories and hidden defeats orchestrated from the corridors of the Circus and Moscow Centre, and staffed by an army of moles and lamplighters, scalphunters and pavement artists. Stalking each other through this twilight landscape are the incomparable George Smiley and his ruthless opposite number, codenamed Karla, the Soviet case officer who has been slowly masterminding the Circus's ruin.
Their extraordinary duel not only raised the spy novel to new heights of realism and complexity, it also constitutes one of the major triumphs of contemporary fiction, confirming John le Carré as a profound chronicler of the post-war world and a novelist of unfailing humanity.
A wonderful, classic le Carre now reissued in a stunning new package.
Ted Mundy, a British soldier's son born in 1947 in the new Republic of Pakistan, made friends with Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran Pastor, as students in riot-torn sixties West Berlin. They met again in the grimy world of Cold War espionage and now in the war of terror and lies.
This is the second of le Carre's Smiley novels, featuring the character of George Smiley who was introduced in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy". The story involves the betrayal of a Soviet spy and suspicions that the network has been infiltrated from the top downwards.
When London publisher Barley Blair receives an important smuggled document from Moscow, the English spymasters are forced to use him to establish the document's veracity. His collusion with Katya, the Moscow intermediary, may represent the way of the future, to the distaste of espionage professionals on both sides.
Written by the author of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", "The Honourable Schoolboy" and "The Little Drummer Girl", this is a terrible story of an English agent. It shows the realities behind the news paragraphs which record the shifts and tensions of the Cold War.